A Pianist, Duly Smitten, Mines a Prolific Master

Image

The pianist Jonathan Biss delved deeply into Beethoven, performing two sonatas in a program at the 92nd Street Y.CreditHiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

By David Allen

Jan. 25, 2015

Jonathan Biss has become an authority on Beethoven. First there was “Beethoven’s Shadow,” an eloquent volume on his relationship with that composer’s music that would be slim if it were available for more than your Kindle. A volume of his ongoing recording series of the complete sonatas has emerged every year of the past few, and the fourth is out this week on his new label, JB Recordings. And his innovative online course, in association with Coursera and the Curtis Institute, is in its third season. So far, over 60,000 students have learned about everything from expositions and recapitulations to the metaphysics of slow movements.

All of which helps to explain why Mr. Biss’s recital at the 92nd Street Y on Saturday night left me nonplused. The program’s two Beethoven sonatas were built from all the right blocks, but I couldn’t connect with them. The initial movement of the very first sonata (Opus 2, No. 1) had an easy suppleness that quelled Beethoven’s stormy waters, and its galumphing minuet had an appropriately lumbering, flat-footed quality. What we think of as the earliest of the late sonatas, the A major (Opus 101), opened with a genuinely declamatory sense of rhetoric and had an aching lyricism in its third movement.

But this was not the kind of Beethoven that shocked or surprised, nor that drove inexorably to an inevitable end. That I found it hard to classify is hopefully a sign that Mr. Biss’s Beethoven is on its way to becoming nothing but its own. But it took his encore, the slow song of Mozart’s C major sonata (K. 330), for me to hear the sense of the miraculous that, on this occasion, seemed missing in the main event.

Contrast that with the rampant excellence of Mr. Biss’s Schoenberg and Berg. Schoenberg’s “Six Little Piano Pieces” (Opus 19) offered concentrated bursts of flavor, with immaculate voicing of the second piece’s staccato thirds bringing the precise demands of much later composers to mind, the bleak whites of the somber last piece’s chords controlled from wax to wane. Berg’s Sonata was brutally aggressive by comparison, forlorn in its rage precisely because of the struggle Mr. Biss set up between the overflowing material and its structural straitjacket. Schumann’s “Waldszenen” were more variable, but “Vogel als Prophet” had a nightmarish edge, like Messiaen having a bad dream, while the airy dreaminess of “Abschied” tied the parts into a whole.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Pianist, Duly Smitten, Mines a Prolific Master. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe